One of the best presentations at SXSW Interactive was Geoloqi's Amber Case.

Cybernetic anthropologist Amber Case spoke to a full house at SXSW this week, in one of the more thought-provoking sessions that I attended. She started off by declaring, "Every time you use that mobile phone of yours, you have a symbiotic relationship with it: you are a cyborg." Perhaps one of the most interesting points that she made was that current mobility interfaces take way too much of our time.

AUSTIN, Texas--These days, smartphones seem like they're everywhere. And with their wide array of built-in sensors, those devices--iPhone, Androids, Windows Phones, and others--can provide us with more and more data about where we are and what's around us than ever before.

Amber's presentation was on Sunday afternoon which is when we were hosting a BBQ for a data center crowd, but luckily I had started interacting with Amber last year and visiting Geoloqi is on my list of 5 companies to touch base when I am next in Portland.

Geoloqi Extends its Reach to 350 Million Mobile Devices, 1.6 Million Mobile Developers, and a Database of 60 Million Places Globally, Giving Carriers and OEMs a Location-Based Platform Like Never Before

Austin, TX (SXSW Interactive) – March 11, 2012 – Geoloqi, a powerful platform for next-generation location-based services, today announced strategic new partnerships with Appcelerator, a leading cross-platform mobile development platform; Factual, a large-scale data aggregation platform with a Global Places API; and Locaid, the world’s largest carrier location platform. Through these partnerships, Geoloqi is significantly enhancing its location data and analytics offering while expanding its reach to millions of new developers and end users through Locaid and Appcelerators’ customer bases.

Why spend so much time thinking about location services? Because there is a huge opportunity to revolutionize industries when you think the way Amber presents. One of Amber's concepts in geofencing which could be viewed as a different way to do what an RFID solution would.

Let's use that example of a supermarket. With the accuracy of an iPhone's GPS, how far outside the boundaries of the store would you have to set the geofence? Case: You could set it and encompass the parking lot and you'd be able to trigger it quite well. We've taken the native, significant location updates and how iPhone and Android handled that, and amped it up and said, well, if you had your GPS running and sending up data to the server every five seconds, your phone would run out of battery. But if you figure out how to intelligently handle it, like if I get to a new area and there are geofences here, then turn on the GPS, or just slowly monitor in the background. Then it's able to converse battery plus get the resolution when it's necessary. We saw that this was a big pain in the industry. When we released a sample app, carriers and enterprises and governments and developers started showing up and saying, This has been a big pain for us, what a relief that somebody else is trying to solve this problem.

Can you explain a little more about geotriggers? Case: They're called geotriggers or geonotes. Geonotes are just text you leave inside a geofence, but a geotriger can trigger anything in life, so lights to turn on in your house, or you can do a lot of machine to machine communication.

Part of what Amber and I had discussed is the opportunities to apply some of her concepts in enterprise scenarios. I missed out being in standing room only keynote of 3200 people, but sitting down in a conference room in Portland is much more useful.

BTW, I did find Amber Case when I was looking up last year who was presenting at SXSW. When I saw her company is in Portland, I reached out to one of my friends who pretty much knows all the start-ups there and asked for an introduction. Why wait to talk to a though leader when you can connect other ways. Conferences are useful, but it can hard to connect with the popular people.